Do many of your employees worry about how they will get their next drink or square meal? In the developed world we take our physical sustenance for granted. “An army marches on its stomach” is usually attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte. The need to keep the troops fed and watered to maintain a fighting spirit is a long-known fact. Lord Nelson ate after his sailors. The US Marines feed their Officers after the men. It’s a symbol of servant leadership.
Continue readingCategory Archives: People management
A Consultant’s Dream
“Employee engagement” is a management consultant’s dream! It brings so many advantages, produces such amazing bottom line results, why hasn’t everyone bought into it? Why do very savvy senior businesspeople think a 10% improvement is what to expect? Scepticism. A perfectly healthy buyer scepticism. The lure of gold created a rising tide of Consultants eager to service the need. You just needed to read a book or two after all.
Continue readingCompetition, Co-operation and Co-ordination
Congratulations! Your organisation is growing and as it grows moves along the usual orgainsational development path. You have teams, then departments, then functions. The organisation constantly evolves to meet the environment. Have you noticed competition between the function heads, department heads and team leaders? Enjoy the video!
Continue readingWorld Class?
What if World Class performance was as simple as taking the brakes off, to release the pent-up competitive energy of your organisation? Imagine you are in a saloon car race, winner takes all. You are on the starting line with your competition, engines revving, watching the lights go from red to green and the flag comes down to signal the start of the race. Your heart thumps as the tyres screech and slide on the tarmac as you move forward in a pack. You slowly overhaul car after car with your 1% advantage.
Continue readingGreed is Good!
Money – pay, bonuses, rewards – is a complicated subject. For something that has been around for thousands of years, human beings have a very poor understanding of what it does. Human lives are so very different now from those far off times, at least for the wealthy who do not have to worry about their safety, starving or their future. You can see that the relationship with money – it provides security – changes as lives change. What does that mean for the leaders of organisations today? Enjoy the video.
Continue readingEmotional Unintelligence
There is a strange illogical perception among managers who consider themselves hardnosed, driving and forceful. They think being emotional and letting the bad temper show is somehow practical. In fact, it is a negative emotional outburst which has no place in the work environment. That is being emotionally unintelligent! As an example of positive management behaviour, here is how to address absence issues. Don’t focus on the number of days absent, focus on the number of days present. In the UK there are 223 workdays in a year. If this employee has only attended for 213 days, then you lost ten days of their help to achieve your and your organization’s goals.
Continue readingManaging remote employees
One of the things the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted, is how many managers need to see their people working to believe they are not being lazy. McGregor’s Theory X and Y, asks if you think people are inherently lazy or if people want to do a good job. Our straw polls at our Workshops average out at about 70% Y, people want to do a good job. How does the manager cope when he or she can’t watch their team working! Enjoy the video!
Continue readingCompetition and Innovation
Any competitive enterprise is a race of some sort. You train to be better at the techniques you know. You seek out coaches who can help you achieve that new advantage. Occasionally, someone comes along with an innovation, like the Fosbury flop in 1968, that everyone rapidly copies. Just like athletes, your organization has to train and innovate, if it is going to be in the race, never mind win.
Continue readingPeople Management vs. Leadership
I’ve always thought of management and leadership as two sides of the same coin. Perhaps the roles are different, but both, without elements of the other, are useless. But what about People Management and Leadership? Surely management of things is administration? Managing people is a skill, only understood by those who have done it. Enjoy the video!
Continue readingWhat Do You Buy And Pay To Throw Away?
The cost of your purchases includes “how” you want to buy them. There is a 40x multiplier between buying potatoes from the field and after processing as crisps (chips in the US). You need to ensure “special requests” that were needed a few years ago haven’t become lodged in the purchasing specification. You may be paying a special price long after the need for the special product has been designed out of your process. Two examples follow showing the value of an overhead cost reduction review between buyer and seller.
Continue reading